


All Night I Wake

by speakmefair



Category: Henry IV - Shakespeare, Henry V - Shakespeare, Richard II - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Afterlife, Dodgy Theology, F/M, M/M, Making Things Better With Dead People, Mud, Multi, No Really Purgatory Has No Furniture, Purgatory, This Is Not How You Resurrect People
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-31
Updated: 2014-08-31
Packaged: 2018-02-15 11:43:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2227746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/pseuds/speakmefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Richard II dies.  And then things get a bit complicated, what with the kind of people you meet in what is (probably) Purgatory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Night I Wake

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JaguarCello](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaguarCello/gifts).



There are quite a few things that Richard of England discovers about being dead.

One of them, surprisingly, is that you are, in fact, _dead_ , which should come onto the 'no, not very surprising at all' list, but in fact does, because, well, being dead does not involve any of the things he's been taught about being dead.

Such as, say, it being all about his soul. He gave up on his soul some time back, worried about hell for a little while, decided it couldn't be much worse than mortality, and just gave up, essentially, on the whole damn thing or worrying about it.

It turns out that was a very, very stupid thing to have done.

**

"Right," he says to one not-contrite-enough Robert de Vere, after watching his own decidedly sub-par funeral from a window in the frankly godawful and seemingly endless building they've found themselves in, which manages to be everywhere and nowhere at once -- all right, _that_ part he's not so surprised by, because _afterlife and its mysteries_ \-- "so what you're telling me is that this is actually all your fault."

"Er," says Robbie. He looks confused. Richard has to admit that's fairly understandable, because, well, for one, obviously not _all of this_ is Robbie's fault, seeing as Robbie was dead _himself_ when Richard decided to make a series of really appalling decisions, but this part, this part _right now_ , with the oddest not-a-building he's ever been in and the fact he's watching his own interral in a place he quite definitely remembers _not_ being asked to be buried at, thank you very much, this part?

This is definitely, absolutely, completely Robbie's fault.

Because it would seem that the afterlife, which Richard thinks deserves a hell of its very own that possibly includes Robbie and really doesn't include him, has loopholes.

Endless, endless loopholes.

Particularly for those who haven't exactly merited going to hell, but really aren't going to heaven anytime soon, and are obviously not going to be ghosts or spirits because they have, of course, been _decently buried_.

"How you ended up here," Richard says with what he feels is extremely warranted bitterness, "is anyone's guess."

He thinks flames and pitchforks are the very least of what Robbie deserves, right now. He hopes they're forthcoming, he hopes he gets to watch, and he'll be absolutely delighted to be the one who finds whatever rotten bloody loophole _that_ one is and _uses it_.

"I think it's Purgatory," Robbie says unhelpfully. Seeing as he only has been unhelpful, to date, this should not be another thing to add to Richard's list of 'what's surprising when you're dead', and yet it manages to make it there. Probably as a subclause, under the heading of 'all the really really stupid things I did while I was alive that involved Robert de Vere'.

He's feeling bitter enough to include the sex on that list, too. Even the time when Robbie found out just how many things could be done with sleeve-ends.

All right, maybe not that time. But all the other times.

He is watching his _own fucking funeral_ through a _fucking window_ , and he wants to _kill something_.

Or hit something.

Which is the next surprising thing he finds out about this whole being dead in a horrible endless building thing.

You can hit anyone who's in there with you.

It's sort of fantastically cheering.

**

The loophole Robbie found (completely by accident) goes, as far as Richard can tell, like this. Between heaven and hell are level upon level and layer after disturbing layer of a kind of spiritual reality that Richard has no intention and Robbie has no ability of deciphering.

Robbie, somehow, found himself in this one. He then bumped into a very friendly (if suspiciously dressed and incredibly smelly) entity -- "The friendly bit should have been your first warning," Richard says, still bitter. "Oh, fuck you," says Robbie -- who told him that if you want someone who has just died to be on the same level... plane... layer... whatever it is that you happen to have found yourself on, you say their name.

Three times.

As quickly as possible.

Which _still_ doesn't explain what Robbie's doing here, but it does, unfortunately, say absolutely everything about why Richard is now apparently condemned to eternity in a building with endless rooms that have strange things in them (presumably belonging to other unfortunate inhabitants) and, of course, Robbie.

And watching (literally) the world go by. The world which seems to be doing just fine without you.

Richard is sure you're not supposed to even consider enjoying yourself in Purgatory, but there has to be more to the afterlife than this.

He sets about finding it.

**

Sometimes he really wishes he hadn't bothered.

Such as when he finds out that while you can't do anything as useful as see the future, no matter what room you go into or window you look out of -- and honestly, one more day of watching Henry dismantle the Royal Treasury with a complete disregard for anything that's remotely beautiful or has sentimental value, and he's going to go mad -- you can look into your past.

And when you do that?

You get to look at it with _insight_. Hindsight, as well, obviously, but insight, too.

And God, it can hurt.

It can really, really hurt.

Because it's gone.

**

"You know time works differently here?" Robbie says one day. He isn't always around. There are only so many times he and Richard can have the same arguments about the same things, and anyway, they covered most of it when they were alive (barring the one which started with "What kind of idiot gets himself killed by a _boar_ , anyway?" and ended up with "I thought you _liked_ idiots who were obsessed with hunting," and went rather swiftly downhill from there, because Richard will let Robbie talk about most things, even Anne -- Robbie had loved her, in his own strange way, and at least is respectful, for the most part, when he mentions her -- but Edward is off-limits.

Richard can stand by that one window and watch that moment of realisation as to just how much Edward loved (loves, he is very much afraid, loves) him far too many times to be sanguine about Robbie's casual flippancy.

_"It's... a sort of encomium. On hunting the hart."_

_Richard had laughed. Edward had not._

_"You had better make this hart-hunting book of yours a description of the best hunt in all Europe, then," Richard had said at the time, trying to hide how shaken he was, and that had been all._

"Differently?" Richard asks now, trying not to think of blunt, bitten-nailed fingers and thick shoulders and callouses in odd places from jousting armour. "Differently how?"

Robbie shows him.

Richard spends what he later realises is more than a hundred years, trying to find a window that will allow him to see heaven.

Not God's heaven, for he is beginning to doubt that even exists, but her heaven, Anne's heaven, his heaven.

To see Anne, just one more time; one glimpse of her smile, the turn of her head, the tumble of her hair over her shoulders first thing in the morning, the light in her eyes when she looked at him.

Just to see Anne.

He never does, and when he has finally stopped looking, when he finally gives up, in a room that holds things that would mean nothing to anyone but him, he realises that just as when he had arrived, Robbie had been there, so, just as inexplicably, he is now gone.

Richard is left in a room without windows, and a goblet that he knows one of them (both of them, perhaps?) drank from at their wedding, and an ostrich feather, and one of her shoes.

Oh God, that shoe. He had never known where it had gone, had never been allowed to look for it, because he had never been allowed into the room where she lay dying, and they hadn't taken off her shoes as she lay there, they hadn't -- and she had hated them, he remembered that, of all the stupid things to focus on, and he had told them to take them off her, at least take off her shoes, and then they had pushed him away, out, along some interminable length of distance, and --

He'd always thought they must have burned her shoes, later, along with the other clothes she had been wearing. 

Why not?

He'd burned everything else himself, after all.

This is Purgatory.

This is how you get what you ask for.

Purgatory, Richard realises, is memory, and it is love, and it is truth.

And it is worse, by far, than death.

**

He has lost the goblet and the feather by the time he returns to the present, and an older, careworn Henry who looks more as though he has passed those hundred fruitless years than Richard just did, but he still has the shoe.

Sometimes he uses the thin ribbons from his undershirt to tie it above his heart.

Sometimes he holds it in his hand.

He never lets it go from him, for how can he know, how can he trust, what might happen if he puts it down, if he lets it stop touching what was once his body?

Robbie has gone, and Henry grows old and wears age and care better than Richard knows he ever would, and Anne is a star far beyond even his sight, let alone his reach, and the shoe she hated and perhaps died hating, perhaps died while she hated it, perhaps died so far gone she forgot she had hated it -- that is all he has of her, now.

Richard thinks he would rather be in Hell.

**

And then Henry dies, and Richard, watching, feels a sorrow he was not expecting, and puts his hand to the window through which he is looking at a man he once thought to be his friend, and then his enemy, and then the author of his death, die feeling an old worn bitter regret that Richard would never have wished upon him at the worst of times.

Henry IV, King of England, breathes his last.

"Oh, Henry," Richard says sadly, remembering a cousin and an old playmate and having, strangely and from a distance, come to know a man who had worn his age better than he ever did his youth. "Henry, Henry, I never wanted this for you."

And then, in total and utter horror, he realises what he has just done, because apparently even a hundred years of searching for the impossible have taught him absolutely _nothing_.

"Oh God," he says in thorough and devout blasphemy. "Oh no."

"Richard," Henry growls from the doorway, and damn it all, why did this have to be one of the times Robbie was _right_? "what in the name of _hell_ did you do this time?"

**

The second time of explaining the loophole doesn't go any better than when it had been Richard's turn to be explained at. To. Whatever it is he's trying to replicate.

Actually, it goes a lot worse. Then again, it's Henry, who has, to be fair, spent quite a lot of his life trying very hard to be, if not good enough as a man, at least devout enough as a king, to merit a place that isn't -- well. 

"Purgatory," Henry says grimly. "You got me stuck in Purgatory. With you."

"Yes?"

"I really hate you," Henry says tiredly, and lies flat on his back on the floor, because there is never any furniture, and Richard has _looked_. "There just aren't words for how much I hate you."

"I'm sorry?" Richard says tentatively. He's almost hoping to get punched. It would be easier to deal with than watching Henry lie on his back with his arms spread open like a distorted crucifix and his eyes closed in despair.

Henry just moans.

He stays like that for days. 

He stays like that through his son's coronation, which Richard (who has never pretended to be unaware of his masochistic side) _does_ watch, and describes in loving detail.

He stays like that until Richard has had enough, walks over to him, and kicks him in the side. Hard.

"What the --" Henry sits up in a hurry. "What was that for?"

"Being an arse," Richard says succinctly. "All right. We're here. We're not happy. We're here because of a loophole."

"And?" Henry starts to lie back down again, and this time Richard grabs him by the hair and _hauls_ him upright.

"And you," he says through gritted teeth, "at least owe me help in finding one. And then we can never, ever see each other again. And then we will both at least feel like we went to heaven. Now get. Up. And. Help."

It's interesting to note that he apparently still has the power of royal command in his voice -- or at least has it over a Henry sunk in the depths of despair, because Henry does, indeed, get up, and straighten his clothes out a bit, and manage a sort of almost-glare.

"So what do you suggest?" he asks.

"Ah," says Richard, who hasn't got that far in the whole planning thing.

Henry says some things about Christ and angels and God that don't sound very devout at all, and stalks off out of the room.

Richard follows. After all, he's got nothing better to do.

**

He should, he thinks in retrospect, have warned Henry about the rooms.

And the windows.

And the whole... time problem. Thing.

"Why am I being forced to watch you watch the world's worst music lesson?" Henry asks despairingly, as they stand by a window and watch a young Edward and an Isabel who could surely have never have been that tiny, could she? -- massacre a version of 'Blow Northern Wind,' while Richard, an audience desperately trying not to laugh, manfully sits and endures it.

He's not enduring it this time, as his younger counterpart is.

He's trying, for the first time since he found Anne's shoe, not to break down and simply cry, Henry's disapproving presence or not.

_"Well, then, Edward, aren't you going to sing it?" He sounds happy, despite the teasing. Edward is barely looking at him, focused as he is on keeping Isabel and the instrument upright and probably not laugh himself, but he does make a face at that._

It's not that Edward had an unpleasant voice. It was just somewhat... monotonous. And he really, really hated singing, and he only did it unwillingly, and usually for Isabel, who was still too young to tease him too much about it – but he would, sometimes, just because Richard asked.

Just because Richard asked. Anything, everything, Edward would do because Richard asked. 

For a brief moment, Richard doesn't want to cry so much as he wants to just be back there, teasing Edward and watching Isabel grow up and practise flirting so very badly, and this time, this time, he would do it right when he hears how Edward changes the words of the last verse --

_"For his love y carke ant care,_  
 _For his love y droupne ant dare,_  
 _For his love my blisse is bare_  
 _Ant al ich waxe won._  
 _For his love in slep y slake,_  
 _For his love al nyht ich wake,_  
 _For his love mournynge y make_  
 _More then all leman._  
 _Blow northerne wynd!_  
 _Send thou me my suetyng!_  
 _Blow northerne wynd! blou, blou, blou!"_

Hindsight, insight.

"He's got the words wrong," Henry says.

__

The look on Edward's face. The look on his own.

"No," Richard says through the pinhole that his throat has become. His voice is thin and almost depthless. "He changed them. For me."

__

The difference between love and desire.

Henry is silent.

__

Isabel's innocence, Edward's hope, his own sense of entitlement to both.

"Oh God," he whispers, and is surprised to feel Henry's hands on his shoulders. He leans his head on the window, and for the first time in all these centuries of watching and remembering and yearning, his breath mists the glass. "Oh God, oh God..."

He can't bear it.

He watches, he makes himself watch, he refuses to look away, as Isabel puts the instrument down very carefully and curtsies to Richard and says "Am I learning it good, my lord?"

And Richard hears himself, all hoarse-voiced with longing for Edward's hands on him, hears himself saying "Beautifully, my dearling, and now would you please your king enough to call him Richard in the presence of your lord tutor, as I hear you have granted him the title Edouard?"

He watches, and now he cannot stop his tears from falling, as Isabel looks up at him through all those silver eyelashes, the first signs of the true beauty she would one day possess, and would never be his to look upon, and says "Am I learning it good, my Richard?"

"Enough," Henry is saying, here and now in the building of endless rooms and times and memories and truths. "Enough, Richard, enough."

He is crying, ashamed and unashamed at once, into the shoulder of the man who had wanted and taken his crown and his birthright and in the end his life; he is crying and he cannot stop himself, as he could not on the day Edward had found him, long after Anne's death, looking at spring leaves and wracked by longing for her to return with their new growth.

Henry is not Edward, he has never been one to show gentleness to any but his children, and even that was always almost painfully awkward to watch, but he is solid and real and there, and he does not resist when Richard kisses him, nor does he say "Enough," again, or push Richard away.

He is awkward, but not uncertain, and they are two dead kings in a hell of their own making, and this, this one thing at least, they can take from it.

That in all the emptiness of death, they have found one another.

**

There is a loophole, in the end.

Ironically, it comes from Henry's son.

"Come to the window," Henry says, and Richard groans.

"No, I'm trying to give them up..."

"Richard, come here _now_ ," Henry snaps, and Richard, to his own surprise, does as he's told.

When he does, he staggers backwards with the shock of it, for he's not observing, he's not remembering, he's there, he's in someone else's mind, oh God above he's in Edward's mind and --

"How --"

"I don't know," Henry says. He is ashen, cold to the touch when Richard takes his hand. "Dear God, what --"

It's a battlefield, or will be. It's a battlefield, and Edward is not Edward, not any more, he is York, he is York, he is the lover of a man named Suffolk, and he is there because he has nowhere else to be, and he --

_Hal has given what is presumably an incredibly inspiring speech. Edward cheers along because Hal, being Hal, is hardly going to have left out the name of York._

_What he really hopes Hal just said is ' lots of them, hardly any of us, let's go and die.'_

_But Suffolk looks like he's been given a chance at bringing back the Grail to his King, so Edward's going to be there, sticking to his promise, keeping his word._

__Live for me, Edward. __

_Suffolk, he thinks, would probably have been a delighted part of that horrible request of Richard's. He lives, and he lives, and he lives so intensely, and he loves with his heart in his eyes and Edward's name on his lips, and Edward will never, never live up to any of it, not his whispered 'yes' to Richard, not his laughing vows of bodily love to Tom, none of it, none of it --_

__Three ravens sat..... __

_And o living God but why will death not take him?_

"God have mercy," Richard whispers, jolted back into himself, and Henry says almost at the same time, "Christ have mercy upon them --"

And the army is shouting, they are shouting for the King, they are shouting for _Henry, Henry, Henry!_ , and the window flies open with a force that sends Richard spinning into a black void that has nothing in it but Henry's name and the cold grasp of Henry's fingers around his, and there is absolution and there is dark and there is such infinite _dark_ \--

**

He opens his eyes to a sea of mud and death.

No-one can see him, nor Henry, he knows that already, but that is no consolation. Not when all he can see is this quagmire of annihilation.

"I have to find --" he says, and Henry's hand lets go of his instantly, and he says -- "Go!"

He finds Edward.

Eventually.

York and Suffolk, amidst mud and gore and the neverending rain, battered almost beyond recognition. But not to Richard.

"Edward, Edward, Edward," he says desperately, and then again, and again, pausing between each three-times plea, trying to move the armour-heavy body, and failing. "Edward, Edward, Edward... oh God, oh merciful God, oh please, Edward, Edward, Edward..."

He knows that Henry is behind him, standing while he kneels in the mud, unable to stop the words pouring from him --

"I can't hold his body, Henry, I can't hold his body, I can't even -- there's mud, and the armour, and he's -- I can't, I can't, oh his face, I can't, and the visor's smashed and he was crying and I can't, and I can't touch his body, not even his dead body, I can't even touch the dead, Edward, Edward, Edward...."

And then Henry is kneeling beside him, and his hands are covering Richard's, pulling them back from the bloody, dented metal, and he puts his arms around Richard and says, gentle and merciless as snowfall, "Ah, Richard. You always got it wrong where you loved the most."

Richard turns in his arms and hits him and hits him until Henry's teeth are as bloody as Edward's dead rictus-smile, and says "You never loved at all, you never knew, you never know, hundreds of years, Henry, and you never -- oh, God, _He is coral of goodnesse, he is ruby of rightfulnese, he is crystal of cleanness_ " Richard can hear his own cracked, horrible voice, the reason that if Edward was almost impossible to coax into singing, he had always simply refused point-blank to even try; he can hear it clanging like a broken bell amidst Henry's son's Te Deum, but he cannot stop trying, even with Henry still holding him back -- "Edward, Edward, Edward..."

Henry holds on, and holds on, and then, of all the unexpected moments of death, this is the most, because he kisses Richard with his bloody mouth, kisses him until he is quiet because he has no more breath with which to plead or pray or curse, and, drawing back a little, says "I always knew love, Richard," and then, smiling a little, "You just have to know the right words for it."

Richard can feel the world hold its breath for him, as Henry lets out his own, the feel of it warm on Richard's face, and whispers, as familiar as any prayer,

"Aumerle. Aumerle. Aumerle."

And behind them, a familiar voice says,

"What the _hell_ have you two done to me _now_?"

Richard starts to laugh. It sounds as cracked as his attempt at singing had earlier, but it feels one hell of a lot better.

"This time," he says to Henry, " _you_ can explain."

**

_Hire lure lumes liht,_  
 _Ase a launterne a-nyht,_  
 _Hire bleo blykyeth so bryht,_  
 _So feyr heo is ant fyn._  
 _A suetly swyre heo hath to holde,_  
 _With armes, shuldre ase mon wolde,_  
 _Ant fingres feyre for to folde,_  
 _God wolde hue were myn!_

**Author's Note:**

> 'Blow Northern Wind' is one of those songs that it is just impossible not to love. There's a lovely recording at http://he4.magnatune.com/all/02-Blow%20Northerne%20Wynd-John%20Fleagle.mp3 if anyone's interested.
> 
> I apologise to my lovely recipient, who probably wanted a great deal more philosophy and a lot less confusion. Alas, it is Them, and they would not co-operate.
> 
> Well done to anyone who recognises the random shoutout to the suspiciously friendly entity.
> 
> Much, much love to the mods, for putting up with my forty million cries of despair over finding any time ever to write!


End file.
